¶1In the online theology wars, it seems like everybody wants to gang up on the evangelicals and accuse them of being a bunch of smoke machine inhaling, boyfriend Jesus song hippies, whose theology is as thin as the communion wafers they only receive once a month. But Protestant evangelical culture also has a lot of strengths that non-eangelicals, both Catholic and Protestant, can learn from. So today, I'm giving credit where credit's due and highlighting three things that evangelicals get right. Starting with number one, pre-evangelization. We tend to think of evangelicals doing a lot of evangelizing.
¶2I mean, it's in the name, right? But they are also very good at pre-evangelization, which is ironic because that term comes from the 20th century Jesuit priest, Father Alfonso Nabrada, who described it as building trust with people so they're better able to receive the gospel. Pope Paul V 6 called pre-eangelization an initial incomplete evangelization that includes explicit preaching of course but also art the scientific approach philosophical research and legitimate recourse to the sentiments of the human heart. Basically pre-evangelization is about meeting people where they're at and making them feel welcome and understood before you share the gospel with them. Even by using things that just meet a person's basic human need for community.
¶3Here's a personal example. One time while my wife needed to have extensive cancer treatment being done in downtown Dallas, I had to kill a few hours with our children after I dropped her off and it was raining so I couldn't take them to a park. So I looked up indoor playgrounds and I found a free one online and it turned out to be at Prestonwood Baptist Church. I took the kids inside and was blown away by how big the space was. This church's children's play area looked like a discovery center or a kids zone with tons of tunnels and play areas.
¶4And it was all free. All you had to do was give your email address to the polite woman at check-in. And just like clockwork, a representative from the church invited me to attend a service a few weeks later. And I admit, I'm tempted to go to Preston Wood's Christmas services because they have what resembles a Broadway show with people on wires and even Santa Claus flying overhead. Then in the second half of the show, they do a traditional reenactment of the nativity story, but with actual camels walking on stage.
¶5But as I said, what really impressed me about this church and really many evangelical churches is that they make a concerted effort to invite people to their services through functions and other things that meet a person's needs for fellowship. Then they use this builtup trust to then explicitly share the gospel. And it's not just playgrounds. Successful evangelical churches host festivals, community talks, advertise Bible studies, and even send mailers to people's homes asking them to come to their services. Though even evangelicals will admit this has a dark undercurrent in allegations of sheepstealing or non-denominational churches seeing each other as competition for members instead of as partners in the evangelical harvest.
¶6But at least you don't have to worry about Catholics and mainline Protestants doing this kind of thing to each other. Many mainline Protestant churches are basically dying social clubs where a handful of elderly people like to sing their favorite hymns like the circle of life all the while oblivious to the fact they're on a sinking ship. Here's a Canadian mainline denomination whose roots go back to 1925 that is reduced to boomers trying to find Christian themes while watching the Simpsons. >> I ka. >> And from a Catholic perspective, one of the worst things I hear about are people who want to become Catholic call their nearest Catholic parish and then never get a call back.
¶7Or even worse, someone does call them back and ask them something like, "Are you sure you want to be Catholic?" Many evangelicals treat evangelism as a battle for souls and that should be emulated. But just because someone is zealous to share their faith, that doesn't mean they have correct theology. When I visited the Mormon Battalion Historical Site in San Diego, I filled out a welcome card that Mormon missionaries later followed up on to have a conversation with me. So, I gave them my work address at Catholic Answers, which I was later told they walked up, saw the office sign, and then promptly turned around. And I'm grateful that US dascese are seeing a surge in Catholic converts, though in many cases these converts explicitly seek the parishes out and weren't invited in the first place.
¶8Though for some people like me, not being super inviting that can be helpful. As I described in this exchange that I had at Russell and Katie's Bless God Conference where many evangelicals were in attendance and I talked about the first time I was choosing a denomination as a teenager. I started going to churches. I went to this wonderful evangelical church and I remember like five people came up to me and said hi, introduced themselves. They're super happy and nice, but I am horribly introverted so like I never wanted to go back.
¶9And then I went to a Catholic church and I walked in like no one said hi and um one person this is my place. >> Introverted [laughter] these are my people. >> Exactly. Hands me the the missile and I sit in the back by myself and I'm like this is this is where I could be. This is where I could be.
¶10But you know, >> but other people need a more explicitly welcoming approach. Though as Catholics, we need to step up our game to create inviting spaces to help people come to our church services where they can be more comfortable hearing about the message of Christ and participating in the worship of him in the liturgy. Number two, a meaningful identity. In April of 2026, Ali Best Stucky wrote the following on X. All this hate for evangelicals when statistically we are the only block consistently holding it down for biblical marriage, the pro-life cause, secure borders, and every other issue.
¶11We are by far the most conservative and united in every political, cultural, and moral area. This is not statistically contested. Without the strength and cohesion of this group, conservatives lose everything. Consequently, the country loses everything. Not an exaggeration.
¶12So ask yourself, why would someone want to divide, destroy, and demoralize this stalwart group? Well, I don't want to destroy evangelicals. I just want them to be, as George Wel put it, evangelical Catholics who want to bring the fullness of the faith to everyone. Even though evangelicals are strong on many cultural issues, they also often falter on things like remarage, contraception, IVF, and surrogacy. But I agree with Stucky that evangelicals have a special identity rooted in upholding traditional positions on issues like LGBT ideology and abortion.
¶13The Public Religion Research Institute found that while only 27% of white evangelical Protestants supported legal abortion, 68% of white mainline Protestants and 62% of white Catholics supported legal abortion. And a 2024 Pew poll found that only 36% of evangelicals supported so-called same-sex marriage, whereas 70% of Catholics and 71% of mainline Protestants supported so-called samesex marriage. So, what are we to make of these results? Well, when it comes to mainline Protestants, some of these responses aren't surprising because the denominations themselves support these evils. According to the Associated Press, in 2024, the United Methodist Church became the last of the major mainline church bodies to go through the process of accepting homosexuality.
¶14Granted, there are small mainline bodies that uphold the traditional teachings, but even there is a catch because, for example, the Presbyterian Church in America or PCA, not to be confused with the larger and far more liberal Presbyterian Church USA, is an evangelical denomination. And in the Catholic world, I wouldn't be surprised if clergy that trade on confusion related to the church's clear teachings on this issue have contributed to some of this problem. But there is a deeper reason to explain these numbers. Labels like Catholic or Presbyterian or Methodist or Lutheran tend to have a wide scope and meaning. They reflect not just current religious beliefs, but also a person's ethnicity, their heritage, and their shared cultural traditions.
¶15So, if someone says they're an evangelical, I can usually guess what they believe about abortion. But if they say they're Catholic, I have no idea what they believe because that label refers to a broader identity claim beyond certain political or moral views. A person might even become a generic deist or even just a spiritual person and still answer in a survey that he is a Catholic or she's a Presbyterian because they remember that was the church they were baptized into or that was the tradition they grew up in. For these people, there aren't many offramps from their religious identity. As a result, the identity has such a wide meaning to the person that it becomes meaningless in conversation until it's clarified.
¶16In contrast, the identity label evangelical tends to be rooted almost exclusively in holding a current specific set of religious beliefs. The Public Religion Research Institute found that 72% of white evangelicals said their religious identity was one of the most or very important identities in their lives compared with 32% of white Catholics and 24% of white mainline Protestants. That means for many non-eangelicals, their identity is rooted in how they were raised. Whereas for evangelicals, it's rooted in what they currently believe. As a result, it's not uncommon for someone to reject major Catholic teaching on contraception, LGBT ideology, and abortion, but still say that they're Catholic.
¶17>> I'm a very Catholic person, and I believe in every woman's right to make her own decisions. However, when an evangelical stops believing in traditional teachings on things like abortion or sexuality, they usually stop calling themselves an evangelical entirely. They instead might say they're now a liberal Christian, a deconstructing Christian, or an exeangelical. This may be because when evangelicals leave their faith, they have to formally express this leaving to other people who will reach out to them. And to our shame, this may not happen often in Catholic parishes where when people stop going to church, many people in the pews might not even notice it.
¶18This shows that comparing self-identified labels between Catholics, mainline Protestants, and evangelicals is an apples to oranges comparison. The term evangelical is subject to a self- selection bias effect where more fervent adherence are more likely to use that term whereas other labels like Catholic or Presbyterian do not have that same effect and so more nominal people are likely to adopt the term. Likewise, people who identify as Council of Trends subscribers, well, they tend to actually be subscribers and not just part of a vague Trenhorn community. And they especially show they have a fervor for this program by supporting us for as little as $5 a month at trenhornpodcast.com. So a better comparison between evangelicals and non-eangelicals involves looking at weekly churchgoers in these traditions.
¶19And in 2022, Pew found that weekly mass attending Catholics were far more pro-life than those who attend mass less often. Pew even said on these core questions about abortion's legality and the start of human life, mass attending Catholics are about as conservative as white evangelical Protestants who stand out among US religious groups with their strong opposition to abortion. However, to be fair, other surveys, even with this subset, still often show weekly evangelicals doing better than weekly Catholic massgoers, which isn't surprising given how well some weekly massgoers can compartmentalize their faith in public life. And this leads us to a third thing that evangelicals get right. Number three, strong doctrinal commitments.
¶20When I spoke to Redeem Zoomer about evangelicalism, he basically said that Christians should attend mainline churches even if those churches formally teach her because Christians should not break away from these historic churches. So, so you'd have a preference then for like let's say like like a mainline church that has these liberal views and female pastors versus let's just say a really conservative evangelical church that's straight down the line on abortion, samesex marriage, male pastors only. Seems like you have a preference for the more liberal mainline one. Am I hearing this right? >> Yes.
¶21And that's kind of why I'm doing the reconista because all the mainline denominations are liberalized to the same extent that the ELCA, the evangelical Lutheran churches. Do you just think they can be fixed? >> Yes, because Athanasius didn't split off voluntarily and start Athanasius's free Bible church in the desert when the majority of the church was hijacked by heretics in the 300s. >> Redeem Zoomer even went further in an online post saying that it's sinful for a Christian to attend non-denominational churches. So I think a lot of evangelicals resonated with Gavin Ortland when he responded to RZ and said that it would be better to attend an independent doctrinally sound evangelical church than a beautiful historic mainline church that teaches heresy even if your goal is to root out the heresy.
¶22>> My view of the church is such that first present second pres there's an overvaluing of institutionality here for what makes something an actual church. I would say I'll put it as blunt as I can. I would rather worship Jesus in a sewer with orthodoxy than in a cathedral with heresy. I don't if the institutional power that backs it ultimately has gone to seed and ultimately has fallen away from the gospel then I think that and I think that is the historic Protestant view. You have to have fidelity to the gospel to be a church.
¶23You have to have proclamation of the TRUE GOSPEL. >> THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. I totally agree with Gavin here because if the entire Catholic Church fell into heresy, I would leave the church and not try to fix it. That's because if this impossible hypothetical really came to pass, then I would know that this could not be Christ's church since Christ promised the gates of hell would not prevail against the church. Now, that doesn't mean individual churches or even regions may not fall into error.
¶24In 2022, Pope Francis warned the German Catholic Church that their sonatal way risked the schism where they would no longer be a part of Christ's church. He told them that the universal church lives in and of the particular churches just as the particular churches live and flourish in and from the universal church. If they find themselves separated from the entire ecclesial body, they weaken, rot, and die. Pope Francis also told an interviewer that to the president of the German Episcopal Conference, Bishop Batsing, I said in Germany, there is a very good evangelical church. We don't need to.
¶25So, I agree with Redeem Zoomer that you should not break away from Christ Church. But if your church doesn't claim to be infallible and the governing body has already universally allowed blue-haired, proabortion, pro-LGBT, proyory pastrics, then I got news for you. The church you're defending can't possibly be Christ's one universal church. And any attempt to fix such a church is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic after it's sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Liberal Christianity just leads to the most abysmal kinds of theology.
¶26As you can see in this clip of an Episcopal asterisk who can't even console someone facing death with the hope we have in Jesus Christ who conquered death. Last week or two weeks ago, I was sitting with an older congregant and that congregant asked me, "What happens when we die?" I had to look this person in the face who is obviously struggling and say, "I don't know." >> So, I applaud evangelicals for sticking to their guns on the issue that true doctrine matters above all else. Though, I would say one of those true doctrines is that Christ established one universal, enduring, hierarchical, and authoritative church. But as Catholics, we should not be afraid to point out when fellow ley and even clergy have deviated from true doctrine and respond to those errors with assertive charity. We should also be able to imitate the evangelical ability to briefly summarize the essence of the gospel.
¶27Even though the Bible itself never explicitly defines the gospel in a way that matches the common evangelical definition as I and Jimmy Aken have noted in previous episodes. However, we should be able as Catholics to give that same kind of evangelical elevator pitch about man's problem of being in sin and the solution God gives us in his free offer of salvation to anyone who would believe and be united to his son Jesus Christ. But ironically, the evangelical commitment to doctrine over all else often leads to doctrinal error. You can see this in evangelicals who say they will not let authorities like early ecumenical councils or even the nyine creed regulate their doctrinal beliefs because they value scripture over tradition. William Lane Craig is a classic example of this because he denies Christ has a truly human will and he more recently denied that the son is eternally begotten of the father.
¶28For more on that, see my colleague Joe Heshmire's recent episode on the subject. And you can find many more examples when it comes to serious doctrinal errors related to liturgy, baptism, the Eucharist, and salvation itself that even historic Protestants would also condemn within evangelicalism. For example, the prosperity gospel is alarmingly prevalent in evangelical communities. But even in spite of those errors, I will still give credit where it's due. And so I would encourage all Christians and especially my fellow Catholics to imitate evangelicals in their successful efforts to create environments where it's easy to share the gospel and invite people to worship to have an identity that is rooted in making religion the central part of your life and valuing truth over merely human traditions and sentiments.
¶29For a good book on applying evangelical values to a Catholic framework, I recommend Francis Beckwith's Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic, which recounts his reversion back to Catholicism after serving as the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.